Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Real Change move raises hackles

Whatever else you might say about it, Real Change is a newspaper. And however loudly you might laugh at the idea, I am a reporter.

Whatever name some people might use for the individuals who sell Real Change, they are newspaper vendors. They sell the paper on the street the same way newspaper vendors used to, one copy at a time to passersby. The only difference between them and the generally poor people who scrape by delivering newspapers to Seattle Times subscribers is exactly one rung on the economic ladder. And a car.

I just thought I’d establish those facts before launching into a blog item that would otherwise be called an editorial.

I bring this up, of course, because Leslie Smith, interim director of the Pioneer Square Community Association, wrote a letter to Mayor McGinn last Monday expressing the organization’s objection to Real Change’s intended move from Belltown to Pioneer Square on May 24.

I am writing this not because I happen to work at Real Change but because six years ago when I got laid off from a job as the Microsoft reporter at the then-dying Eastside Journal, I chose to work at Real Change. I chose to make my life’s work exposing the systemic social and political inequities that ravage poor people like our vendors.

Like the war going on in Ballard right now between those reduced to living in motor homes and the business owners who call them thieves and scum. Like the war the state Department of Transportation is waging right now on those reduced to living in tents that it pays prison inmates to load into trucks — pots, pans, sleeping bags and all — and drives straight to the dump, leaving the destitute with only the clothes on their backs.

Like the aggressive solicitation ordinance that Tim Burgess, a councilman who lives in his own home on Queen Anne, insists has nothing to do with moving along the homeless, even though few people with jobs are reduced to begging.

The Pioneer Square Community Association, like the Belltown Community Council, is all for the panhandling ordinance as a means of combating “street disorder.” In her letter to the mayor objecting to Real Change’s move, Leslie Smith says we failed to approach her association or conduct any outreach – to which I say thank you, Cienna Madrid at The Stranger, for pointing out that Smith skipped doing the same with us: She didn’t even call for a coffee date with any of us before writing the mayor to urge that we be stopped.

“We feel that it is imperative,” Smith says in the letter, “that service providers seek out other neighborhoods of Seattle that have not exceeded their ‘fair share’ of services.”

It’s true that we are a nonprofit. And it’s true that we collect winter coats and boots for our vendors. It’s our equivalent, you might say, of the holiday door prizes or restaurant coupons that any newspaper circulation department might hand out to its staff. But we are not a “service provider.” We are an employer, one that you would think the Pioneer Square Community Association and the residents it claims to represent would be thrilled to have.

If it’s 2,000 residents, as the wife of one PSCA member told one our staff members in an e-mail on Thursday, I’m guessing a fifth of those residents are artists. I’m relatively sure, with certain exceptions I could name, that the Pioneer Square Community Association doesn’t speak for them or the residents and business owners who fought the organization tooth and nail a few years ago to stop the city from ripping up what we once knew to be Occidental Park and cutting down a third of its grown trees.

In her e-mail, Jennifer Kelly, the wife of PSCA member Michael Kelly, who was the first to write us objecting to our move, even found herself apologizing for a March 26 blog that she posted opposing our move.

It’s a position, it seems, that her boss at VIA Architecture, which is located in Seattle’s downtown core, felt the need to discuss with her. At least, that’s the way her apology to Real Change reads. You be the judge:

… Although I’ve been doing the blog for 7 or 8 months now, I’m still learning a lot … and no better way to learn than by making a mistake, right? I work for an incredible architecture firm and in conversations with the principal of the firm (who has a lot of neighborhood and community building experience), I realize that I went about this all the wrong way and inadvertently threw Real Change under the bus.

I know that my heart was in the right place and I thought that I was standing up for my neighborhood, but that I framed the situation in entirely the wrong way. I never wanted this to become a Real Change vs. Pioneer Square or for there to be a winner or a loser in this discussion. I also talked about the homeless situation in Pioneer Square from entirely the wrong vantage point.

The e-mail ends with Jen Kelly making an earnest offer for a sit-down meeting with one of our staff members — for that person-to-person talk that the Ballard business owners should be having with their neighbors in the motor homes, that the state’s employees should be having with the people living in tents under I-5. After she does, I think — at least, I hope — that she will have a very different picture of what Real Change does and who our vendors are.

CORRECTION: Michael Kelly is not a member of the Pioneer Square Community Association. He and wife Jen are residents of the Pioneer Square neighborhood.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.